Sorry for being lazy/Christmas and New Year

First of all a MASSIVE apology for not blogging for the past few weeks, but to be honest, there’s not been a lot going on, but I can tell you about Christmas and New years.

So just after my last blog the JENGA staff went on Christmas holidays and so did me and Sam. We went down to Jinja, which is a beautiful town just on the Nile, so it has great places to stay and LOTS of Mzungus. We stayed at a backpackers place for a couple of nights. It was a pretty entertaining trip; on the first night we met this quality Canadian couple who were on their honeymoon, we met them at around 6, had dinner with them and stayed up chatting to them about God until around 1:30. They were quality because that was all they wanted to talk about, I really felt God doing stuff, the talk was just so easy and it was amazing how much we all opened up and shared stuff you wouldn’t usually share with people who you’d just met a few hours earlier. We continued to hang out for the rest of our time there.

The day before we left, me and Sam decided to go off on a long bike ride - even though neither of us have ridden bikes since we’ve been here and the heat during the day was hitting 35+. We hopped on a bus early in the morning to go across town to where you can hire bikes. The guy seemed to really like us because Sam is a bit of a Mountain Bike nerd, so he gave us a couple of really good bikes, he even gave me his own! We set off for Itanda falls, which is 38 km away at around 10. We were both doing well around 15 km into the ride, but then it got hilly and hot – also I forgot to bring sun cream, poor shout. I absolutely died. But it was still great fun. I miss Clarissa (my road bike at home)

We had to go home a bit early because there was some final Christmas work that needed to be done for JENGA, which was cool because I was burnt and peeling from the bike ride and so just wanted to bathe in after-sun.

Then that Sunday was Christmas! Now I don’t really get excited for Christmas back home, but this Christmas was awesome! We went to Bethel in the morning in the big new building, which made it feel like I was at a church at home somehow: apart from the rudimentary African church echo, of course. After than I had my first Christmas dinner with the whole church family, we sat and watched some African church video on the projector and ate rice and beef stew. Oh yes. After that we went to Vinnie’s house for my second Christmas dinner, rice, beef stew (again) and Mama Grace’s amazing charcoal cooked chicken, she’s got some unbelievable chicken cooking tekkers. We stayed there for a couple of hours and bantered with the family. I commented about how having eight children is a huge family, Vinnie rejected this claim because next door they have 45 children! That wasn’t a typo. The guy has 8 wives, so there are around 54 people in his family. The banter continued until around 530 and then Sam and I walked back home to prepare our stomachs for a third Christmas dinner. In the evening we went to MJ and Stuart’s house. They are a South African couple who run the cotton ginnery that Ben works for. We went round for Barbeque Turkey and all the trimmings, including Christmas Crackers and Christmas Pudding. It’s fair to say that I was full after that… Paulo was staying the night so just before we crashed we did presents. I got the boys African shirts which went down a treat. Sam made us a picture frame from our time up Wanale. And Paul got me some toothpicks.

Sam, Paul, Natalie and I all went back to Jinja for New years. We sat around, played games, read books and people-watched. It was quality.

So it turns out that my parents couldn’t have come at a worse time than they did. Essentially they made me have 5 weeks for Christmas holiday. Sounds great but it’s not really why I’m here. Sort of feels like I missed out a massive chunk of my time. However on Monday I went back to work. It’s been so good being back at work. It was like a big crazy family reunion on Monday, just a lot of shouting and hugging. Then Sam and I went back to CRO as well yesterday, which I loved, even though it was bloomin’ hot. Sam played in goal so claimed to be Joe Hart, I’m not giving that name to him just yet.

A bit of sad news is that my best Aussie friend in the world is leaving on Friday night. L I will miss Sam loads. We’ve pretty much been attached to each other for the last two-and-a-half months so it will be weird without him. He’s been great for me; he’s challenged me and has become a really good friend. Gonna miss you mate.

A lot more stuff is going on now so I'll be sure to keep you in touch more often.

Dan

jengauganda.org